


Equal Opposite Reaction

by alexanderhammyton



Category: American Revolution RPF, Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Canon Era, Depression, Multi, Panic Attacks, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, and very fucked up, john and alex are so gay for each other, lafayette is a smol beb, yall this is angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 08:32:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6510670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexanderhammyton/pseuds/alexanderhammyton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have never fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell." ~ William Tecumseh Sherman</p>
            </blockquote>





	Equal Opposite Reaction

**Author's Note:**

> So this is my huge-ass fic about how the war affected Alex, John, and Lafayette, because they were all so young in the duration and saw some pretty shitty stuff. This is super trigger-y be warned, I'm sorry.

     When Hamilton is twelve years old, his mother dies beside him. He recovers. A few years later, he walks in on his cousin hanging in his room. Hamilton lives. At seventeen, a hurricane drowns his town, and a few months later, the ship bearing him to America catches fire and yet still he survives. The consequences come later.

     The first time it rains in New Jersey, his mind goes stark white from pure panic, his throat seeming to quit its work as he fights for air. He wakes up on the floor, covered in ink with blood dripping over his eyebrow. He explains the wound away later, telling everyone he had run into a tree while strolling the woods. Alexander learns to manage his episodes, writing until he falls asleep in his work, every time it rains harder than a drizzle. He manages.

~~~~~~~

     John Laurens is born into a wealthy family, deep in the South, as the leaves begin to change from emeralds and jades to ambers and crimsons. He grows up in the southern heat, face freckled and skin tanned, but still, a proper gentleman. Begin a proper Southern gentleman, one grew accustomed to slavery, but there was always a nagging, biting thought in the back of John’s head. He _owned_ these people, and something was fundamentally wrong. Of course, he never voices his concerns to his father, who, he knew, would only cuff him around the head and tell him to keep such thoughts to himself.

     His mother dies when he is sixteen, leaving him under the care of his father, who takes him to London. He is twenty-one when his ten-year old brother, James, falls from a wall and cracks his skull. This of course, is when he is under John’s watch. John finds solace in the bottle, staring down the barrel of a gun, although he never pulls the trigger.

     He meets Martha Manning in London. It is a marriage that is born of pity and honor, as he has no desire to leave his unborn child a bastard. He leaves before she is even born.

~~~~~~~

     Like John Laurens, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette is born wealthy in the balmy south, an ocean away in France. Like Alexander Hamilton, his mother dies when he is twelve, but he is left much better off. He attends university in Paris, becoming a Musketeer and presenting himself at court, where he is laughed off the dance floor by Marie Antoinette.

     He is wed at sixteen, to whom he thinks is the most glorious girl on the face of the earth, Adrienne. They live in Versailles as he continues his education. Soon, he hears of the revolution brewing across the sea, to which he agrees to lend his sword. He is nineteen when he leaves, against the wishes of his king. He writes Adrienne a letter.

~~~~~~~

     Alexander quickly learns the hellish situation which is battle. He is a twenty-one year old artillery captain running from British fire as they flee New York. He hears the bullets whistling past him and the dull thumps as they hit their marks. Men fall, screaming, around him. He trips and falls over a boy sprawled on the ground, no older than sixteen. Alexander feels his stomach turn itself inside out at the sight, just before he feels a warm spray of scarlet over his face as another boy falls beside him. He scrambles to his feet and runs.

     Someone comes to fetch him, soon after they make it to camp, finding him ringing his hands and trying not to lose the contents of his stomach. He follows the boy through camp until he is standing outside the flaps of the General’s tent, covered in blood that’s not his, his uniform battered and dirty. He thinks himself unworthy to come before the great General Washington as he is, but the boy they sent gave him no time to clean up.

     He leaves the tent with a promotion and a new epaulet on his shoulder.

~~~~~~~

     John rides into camp when the sun is highest, asking where he could find General Washington. He had written a letter to the man the month before, and had received a reply the week earlier, requesting his presence at his earliest convenience.

     He swings himself off his horse and is met by a small man in dressed in royal blues and golds who introduces himself as Alexander Hamilton. As they walk together towards the large tent John assumes is Washington’s, Hamilton talks, mostly about John’s upcoming duties, including letter writing, and John studies him. Alexander, he thinks, is seemingly non-stop, with an ambitious light behind his lovely eyes. His messy hair is pulled back into a queue at the nape of his neck and his uniform somewhat hangs off him, not quite fitting on his skinny, but toned, frame.

     No sooner does John think all this before a wave of self-loathing washes over him, breaking him out of an Alexander-induced haze. God damn him and his, inclinations. He knows he is a sinner, that he will go to hell. Sodomy is a death sentence, and he must keep these thoughts to himself, especially in the close quarters he and Alexander will inevitably be in.

     By the end of the afternoon, he is an aide-de-camp to General George Washington. He is also sharing a tent with the gorgeous firebrand who kept flashing him dirty smirks throughout his orientation.

~~~~~~~

     Lafayette meets Hamilton and Laurens that July, drowning in the humidity. He is immediately struck by the chemistry between the two, almost, and he nearly doesn’t permit himself to think it, more like lovers than brothers. He makes fast friends with the pair, spending many late nights sitting on one of the two cots in their tent as Alexander writes his letters and John pours them all whiskey from a bottle pilfered from supplies. Lafayette slowly gets used to the burning of the straight whiskey, so different from the sweetly sour wines of his homeland.

     He constantly badgers Washington for command. After all, he says, he came across the ocean to fight for this cause, so why shouldn’t he have command as a Major General should. He emphasizes the last two words. But Washington keeps saying he is too young, not even twenty, and that he is worried how the men would react to a foreign commander. Still, he is relentless until he gets his chance. Then comes Brandywine.

~~~~~~

     Brandywine is a bloody mess. The sun is covered by clouds, the day beginning with fog so thick, Lafayette can barely see his men from the back of his horse. Cornwallis attacks around four, advancing with a bayonet charge and ending in a bloody retreat. The weakened army is attacked again two hours later, by General Knyphausen, with only darkness providing relief for the battered, bloody men. They leave most canons, the horses shot dead. Alexander later receives a rough estimate of the total casualties: over thirteen hundred men either dead, captured, or wounded.

     It is nearly midnight when the men begin pouring back into camp, bruised, bloody, and exhausted. Alexander hurries through the men, looking for the line of horses. He finds John barely staying on his bay mare, looking a bit punch-drunk from lack of sleep and spattered in blood. He just about falls from his horse into Alexander’s arms, tucking his head into Alexander’s shoulder and mumbling into the fabric.

     Alexander takes him back to their tent, where he strips John out of his bloodied uniform and pushes him into the cot. Before he can fall after him, a messenger arrives at the front of the tent with news. And then John and Alexander are no longer tired.

~~~~~~~

     They pull back the flaps of the medical tent, where they are rebuffed by a nervous looking orderly who is insistent that they not come in. They hear Lafayette call for them and they push past the boy and into the part of the tent sectioned off. Alexander struggles to control his breathing, the smells of the tent reminding him of his sickness in his youth, with his mother lying beside him. Then John places a hand around his, grounding him.

 They find Lafayette sprawled on a table, stripped of his boot and stockings with the cuff of his breeches cut to the middle of his thigh. The makeshift bandage on his calf is soaked scarlet. He smiles weakly at them, eyes alight with tiredness and pain.

     The surgeon is bustling around, pulling up two stools for John and Alexander to sit at Lafayette’s head while he works. He tells them that laudanum is in short supply, but he could spare some for the major general. Lafayette declines everything. Instead, he downs a bottle of whiskey, which Alexander and John find amusing, remembering the Marquis choking and sputtering on the alcohol just two months before.

     Even though he is thoroughly drunk, Lafayette still screams, nearly crushing John and Alexander’s hands as the surgeon carefully attempts to extract the bullet from his calf. He gives him a rest after five minutes of trying, leaving Lafayette panting and sweating. The surgeon warns him when he is about to begin again and he whines pitifully, until the forceps dig in and his mind is wiped of anything but pain.

     Alexander winces when Lafayette screams out again and grasps his hand. He talks to the man softly, in his native French, which seems to quiet Lafayette for a time, although he still groans with every probe into his wound. On his other side, John helps hold him down when the surgeon requests, begging apology of Lafayette, who only gives a nod in understanding.

     General Washington arrives just as the surgeon pulls the ball from Lafayette’s leg and drops it into a bowl beside him. The man immediately stands at attention, until Washington tells him to attend to his patient, which he does. He wraps the wound with clean bandages and cleaning up his supplies. John and Alexander follow the suit of the surgeon, standing up from their places by Lafayette’s side until he lets them at ease.

     Lafayette is nearly unconscious by the time he is gently moved from the surgery table, scooped up by General Washington himself, who insists that Lafayette is treated as his own son. John teases Alexander, saying that he was too small to carry Lafayette anyway. Alexander retaliates later, back in their tent, shoving his cold hands under John’s shirt as they both undress. He yelps, and Alexander laughs, tangling his limbs with John’s as they fall into a dreamless sleep.

~~~~~~~

     Things are different after Brandywine. Lafayette is gone for weeks, recuperating in Bethlehem as the defeated army licks its wounds and plans its next move. Alexander and John continue their duties as aides, running errands around camp and writing letters. The dynamics between them shift, Alexander notices. Of course, he flirts more with John. How could he not? He is handsome, with sea-foam eyes and a dusting of freckles. Alexander likes to think that John returns his advances, even if nothing comes of it.

     A change comes about a week after Brandywine, late at night. Alexander is writing late, bathed in candle light, John sleeping on his cot behind him, when a strangled scream startles him and he upends a bottle of ink on his desk. He whips around to see John sitting bolt upright. He is panting, eyes wild with fear, and he is looking around like a startled young foal. For Alexander, it is like looking at a mirror image of himself, as he recognizes the signs of a nightmare. He gets them often enough. So he stands from his desk and walks over to the cot, stretching out next to John and gathering him into his arms. John cries, Alexander soothes him, and they fall asleep wrapped in each other.

~~~~~~~

     John’s attacks become frequent, striking him at the most inopportune times. A few days after his first nightmare, he is speaking with General Washington when a wave of panic washes over him and all of a sudden he can’t breathe and his pulse quickens and he needs to get out. He excuses himself, rushing out of the tent to find his Alexander, and when did he start thinking him as _his_ Alexander? He collapses into his bed when he stumbles past the tent flaps. He barely registers Alexander curling around him and stroking his hair, whispering nonsense French in his ear. God bless his Alexander, always knowing how to calm him.

     The first time he returns the favor, it is pouring rain, with thunder shaking the earth and lightning cracking in the sky. That’s when he finds Alexander curled almost in a ball in their tent, drawing in great gasps of air and pressing his dagger into the delicate skin of his wrists. John slaps it away immediately and ignores Alexander’s flailing fists, pinning his arms to his sides and hugging him to his chest. He feels Hamilton shaking like a leaf as he pulls him into bed, telling him to breathe deeply. They manage.

~~~~~~~~

     Alexander goes on a mission and is reported dead, drowned in a river. John debates finally pulling that trigger. Hamilton trudges through the entrance to his tent hours later, soaking wet, finding John drowning himself in a whiskey bottle. His sleeves are drawn up past his elbows, and Alexander catches a glimpse of red slicing his wrists, little speckles staining the cuffs of his sleeves. John nearly jumps out of his skin. The true surprise comes when he crosses the space to Alexander finally, finally kisses him full on the mouth.

     His whole being is singing, he thinks, and he deepens the kiss without any prompting, standing on his tiptoes. He feels John’s hands at the small of his back, pressing them flush together. Unfortunately, he has to report to the General, which means parting with his Laurens. And now they both think of one another as _theirs_. John makes him an offer to take him to bed when he returns, and he simply can’t refuse.

     They fall asleep with limbs tangled and sweat drying on their skin.

~~~~~~~

     Alexander frets whenever John is out on patrol, or in battle. The other aides tease him, telling him that he is like a worried wife, which he laughs off. But this time, he had had good reason to fret. John had returned from Germantown with a bullet through the shoulder and had refused to get himself seen to before all his men have been tended to, until Alexander’s grousing had forced him to the medical tent. Luckily, it was through and through and there would be no lasting damage.

     He is gentle with John for a time after his injury. Being shot only seems to exacerbate his panic spells and nightmares, and the bags under his eyes attest to the fact that he has not had a decent night’s sleep in days. John jokes they only make him look like Alexander, who swats him lightly before leaning in and capturing John’s lips in a kiss.

~~~~~~~

     As winter approaches, Lafayette returns, but he is different. He is jumpier, easily startled, like a skittish horse. His leg aches in the cold, and he jumps at any stick breaking under a foot. If he ever does have panic spells, he doesn’t reveal it, at least to Alexander or John. That is, until John is walking by his tent and hears muffled sobs and quiet French. He pushes past the opening of the tent to find Lafayette curled up in his cot, shaking as he cries into his pillow. John immediately drops to his knees beside the bed and runs his fingers through Lafayette’s hair. It’s a strangely intimate gesture, one he does with Alexander in their now shared cot, but he feels Lafayette needs it now.

     Lafayette barely registers John’s fingers in his hair. All he can think of is the men falling around him, the screams of the horses. Then he remembers the shocking pain of the bullet ripping into his leg, and the surgeon probing around the wound and all he does is cry harder. He rolls to face John, burying his face into the fabric of John’s shoulder.

~~~~~~~~

     Valley Forge is true hell on earth. Men die of hypothermia one after the other and others are in a constant state of cold. They are lucky if once a week, only one gunshot rings through the camp at midnight. This doesn’t help Lafayette, who descends into a state of self-loathing, blaming himself for his men’s suffering. Alexander and John move their cots into his tent, pushing them all together so they can tangle together and conserve heat in the nights. It’s all they can do to keep Lafayette from turning on himself with his dagger and pistols.

     A lack of winter thunderstorms means that Alexander’s panic spells become less frequent, yet John still finds narrow cuts crisscrossing his wrists, hips, and thighs when they are sampling each other’s favors. John takes his daggers from him. In turn, Alexander curls around him when his nightmares return.

     Lafayette receives a letter from Adrienne, delivering the news that his daughter Henriette has died. John and Alexander find him wailing in the tent. A cocked pistol is in his hand, and they have to wrestle it from his grasp as he cries. He falls asleep in John’s arms. A few days later, Alexander pulls a dagger from his hands. Over time, Lafayette seems to recover, as much as he could.

     They manage.

~~~~~~~

     The years go by. Charles Lee is court marshalled; Benedict Arnold turns on them all; the British take John’s hometown of Charleston. John and Alexander continue their illicit affair, taking what opportunities they can. They are careful, as tent walls are thin and less than sound proof, but they have more than a few close calls. Lafayette finds out, but they suspect that he knew from the beginning, even before they did. The General walks in on them forehead to forehead one time, and they pass it off under the guise of French greeting customs.

     Alexander meets Elizabeth Schuyler, a lovely girl by all accounts, and it is three weeks later when they announce their engagement. John is devastated. Alexander comes to him after a week of silence and begs to take him to bed again, saying that it is possible to love more than one person at once. John agrees, even though he knows that it will one day break his heart. He spends that night under Alexander, hardly muffling their breathy moans.

     Lafayette goes back to France to secure French cooperation in the war effort, while Alexander continues to beg for command. John is taken prisoner of war, not able to leave Pennsylvania. He exchanges letters with Alexander, each more risqué than the last, although that is carefully hidden. He is invited to Alexander’s wedding, and to his wedding night, but he cannot leave his boundaries. John misses his lover’s wedding. Eventually, he is returned to his Alexander, who takes him to bed and finds fresh scars adorning his tan skin.

~~~~~~~

     Alexander finally gets his command, at Yorktown, where he, John, and Lafayette lead their troops to an American victory. John is one of the chief negotiators of the British surrender. After, he meets Alexander on the edge of camp, where they throw themselves into each other’s arms and cry with joy, exchanging wet kisses. That night, the sounds of their passions are drowned out by the celebration of the men around them.

     John is sent south after Yorktown and receives a letter in January from Alexander announcing a son, Phillip, and he is happy for him, but without Alexander to ground him, his panic spells get worse. He is reckless, throwing himself into pointless skirmishes. His fellow leaders joke that it’s almost like he’s trying to get himself killed. It’s not far from the truth.

     He gets his wish that July, at Combahee River, two months before his birthday. He is twenty-seven.

~~~~~~~

     Lafayette returns to France a hero, welcomed at court. He is reunited with Adrienne, Georges, and Anastasie. Virginie is born months later. He still has his nightmares, but his panic spells die down. Little does he know, years later, he will be in command again, as the people storm the Bastille and hang officials in the streets. They return, but this time it is his children who ground him. He lives for them and for his darling Adrienne.

~~~~~~~

     Alexander receives the news of John’s death a few weeks after the fact, and he breaks. Eliza doesn’t know what to do when she finds her husband in his office, surrounded by upended furniture and paper. A broken pot drips ink onto the floor, and she spots a pistol on the desk. Alexander is kneeling in the middle of the room, tears streaming down his face. Eliza pulls him to his feet and tucks him into bed before returning to clean up the spilled ink. The furniture can wait.

     Alexander is never the same, but he manages.


End file.
